The first three days after his death were sunny. I was angry that the sky wasn’t mourning the same as us. Nobody thinks it’s going to be them until it is. And there’s no shaking the feeling of shock that courses through every drop of blood in your shaking body when you hear that news. Yet my grief doesn’t feel like my own. It’s for my step mother who lost her only son, for my father who had been there to raise him by her side since he was still a wee munchkin in daycare. It’s for the little boy I remember who used to sneak under my bed and spy on me and my friends and the little smile I’d wake up to each morning. I wanted to be the cool big sister for him and so much of me thinks I failed him, that I should have been there for him more and maybe I’m grieving that most. But I started my own life so young. I remember the day he looked down at my first born child in awe at how little she was, making him Uncle Ryan at only 9 years old.
We weren’t as close as we got older but always kept in touch, messaging each other for the important stuff. After years of pursuing different paths, he had finally found something that he was doing so great at. I was so proud of him and yet I had been busy raising a family of my own, walking my own path, I never got to tell him. But he was always my brother. He will always be my little brother.
Ryan was an avid outdoors-man, an athlete, a friend to many, and loved by everyone in our family. He had the most infectious smile and biggest heart and experienced life at its fullest. There won’t be a day that goes by that he isn’t in the thoughts of those who loved him.
I’ve experienced death and grief before. I’ve been there for last breaths and I’ve spoken at funerals and I’ve seen lifeless bodies in caskets waiting to be buried in their final resting place. I’m not scared of death. I’ll accept it when the day comes for my own, but having to live when someone else dies, that’s the hard thing. Because the world doesn’t stop when you need it to. It keeps going even when you can’t and the grief doesn’t happen in stages, it happens in an unpredictable kind of chaotic nature where one minute you’re numb, staring at a wall, pinching yourself just to try and feel anything. Until the next trigger comes, and you can’t stop the tears, the sobs that come deep from your chest that you’re just begging to end because the pain is too great. And then you’re indifferent to it all again, trying to get on with your day, looking for some mindless activity to distract yourself knowing that when you stop, you’ll start to feel again and you don’t want to feel because then it’s real. And at nighttime, when you’re so exhausted from the emotional turmoil and you just want to sleep, you ruminate about every “what if” scenario, wondering what their last moments would have been like, torturing yourself with thoughts that don’t belong in your head. And the next day, you wake up and you do it all over again hoping maybe today it won’t be so hard.
Whatever life we thought we would live is different now. There will always be a void. Holidays will be more empty. September won’t be as colourful. His absence will always be felt. And I’ll hug my loved ones a little tighter each time I see them, never knowing if it will be my last.
I suppose writing has always been my way to grieve, to process things in some way, and yet I feel I’ll never do it justice to write about it, to write about him. My brother died tragically at 26 years old while doing something he loved and that is how I’ll have to find peace with his departure.
To my dear brother, wherever death has brought you, let love always guide you back home.
In Loving Memory of Ryan Davies
1998-2024
Picture Taken In 2003 on a family trip.
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